So, where does one start reading X-Men comics...?

A few months ago my nephew, who was then 13 going on 14, sent me a text asking if I could get him some Batman comics from the library where I worked, and he provided a list: Year One, Arkham Asylum, The Long Halloween, Hush, Dark Nights: Metal and Dark Nights: Death Metal. 

Older and/or more cynical readers might criticize Jeph Loeb's writing and elements of the Dark Nights books, but it's a solid list, and I wondered if he found it as a list of best or most popular Batman books somewhere online (I thought The Dark Knight Returns was notable absent from it, and I was a little surprised to see Scott Snyder's multiverse "crisis" series on there instead of Court of Owls). 

But as the guy being charged with finding those books? Easy peasy. They are all popular, fairly evergreen, in print and readily available through many different libraries in our system. Additionally, I had read all of them and was thus quite conversant in them; if my nephew liked any of them and wanted to know what to read next, or wanted more Batman (or other comics) from any of the creators, I could recommend other books until he was sick of hearing me talk.

A few weeks ago, I got a much scarier text from my sister/his mother: "The boy is interested in x men comics...Can you borrow some x men?"

Now, if you've been reading the site for a long time, you probably know that I have read some X-Men comics in the past...the huge cloud of "labels" on the right of the blog shows that I've used that label on 43 posts before (UPDATE: And, as I just noticed, 16 for "the x-men"...my labeling system is far from useful, I imagine). Still, I am far from what you might call a fan of the franchise...or even much of a knower-about-er. Like, I'm certain I know more than my sister—I know there's a hyphen between "X" and "Men" for example—but that is probably the comics franchise I know the least about, and most dread being asked to recommend books from (I used to think the Legion of Super-Heroes was even scarier, what with all the continuity reboots, but this recent-ish post from Mike Sterling convinced me that it was actually much simpler than I thought). 

In addition to reading so relatively few X-Men comics though, the franchise is just so...big. Launching in 1963, it is decades younger than Batman, but, there are just so many characters and, by the '90s, so many different titles and what seems, from afar, a rather convoluted number of alternate futures, from which characters occasionally come to join the cast. Additionally, the franchise seems to be one that (perhaps apropos) has many permutations. 

That is, as much as Batman comics may change over the years, from era to era and creator to creator, it's still essentially the same basic story of a superhero and or his sidekick/s defending a single city from criminals, the tone being more mutable over the decades than anything else.

Not so with the X-Men...and their many related X-teams and solo series spin-offs. 

Maybe a year or so ago, a co-worker had asked me to suggest some X-Men comics to him. Asking him some preliminary questions about his interest, he said it started with some Marvel video game (Rivals, I think...?) which led to him watching the first season of X-Men '97 (He was 25 or so, and thus never saw the original cartoon series that '97 was a continuation of).

I spent a chunk of the rest of our shift thinking about it and occasionally searching the library catalog, and I ended up telling him that my personal favorite was Grant Morrison and company's New X-Men run (which, in addition to its quality and new reader friendly take, has the advantage of being relatively limited in size, and thus a more manageable run than some of the more famous runs), but that Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men is probably the best place for him to start (Again, new reader friendly and short and distinct enough to be manageable).

 I further suggested he just put "X-Men" and "Epic Collection" into the catalog and look for covers with characters he liked or titles that sounded familiar...between the physical books and Hoopla, I think the library has all of the X-Men Epic Collections, and these seem to feature the characters from the cartoons prominently.

(Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought the original X-Men series was a sort of amalgam—a word I learned from comics!—of storylines from Chis Claremont's long run with the then-current Jim Lee costumes and designs and the cast of the '90s comics, and thus there weren't comics that perfectly reflected the cartoon...)

I spent more time considering what to recommend my nephew, though. 

Now, I am old enough that I did watch the original 1992-1997 X-Men: The Animated Series...or, at least, the first few years' worth of it (I was 15 in 1992, and by the time I got to college I didn't spend much time at all in front of televisions). In addition to my appreciation of the theme song, I mostly found it hilarious, particularly the over-the-top, melodramatic voice work and the handful of extreme accents. (I laughed pretty much any time Rogue or Gambit said anything, and I was a big fan of what a friend of mine referred to as the "exertion" noises that Professor X would make when pushing his psychic abilities or in some kind of psychic distress). 

This wasn't my first exposure to Marvel's merry mutants, though, as I still distinctly remember their appearance on the 1981-1983 Saturday morning cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (For whatever reason, the part I remember best was that Iceman and Firestar were imprisoned in rooms right next to one another, and their efforts to use their powers to try to escape meant they were inadvertently hurting one another). 

While I'm pretty sure I borrowed a copy of God Loves, Man Kills from the Ashtabula library as a teenager, back when there were, like, maybe 20 books of comics in the library, most of which were comic strip collections, I didn't really read any X-Men comics until around 2000, which is 1) When I finally started reading Marvel comics regularly, as they started hiring some of my favorite DC writers and publishing their Ultimate line, 2) When the first X-Men film was released and, related, 3) When Marvel seemed to make a concerted effort to sell X-Men comics to people who weren't already X-Men fans.

And that, I suppose, is why I am poorly suited to recommend X-Men comics; all the comics I read tended to be ones tailored for people who did not like the X-Men of The Animated Series or the Capcom fighting game or whatever (And I always thought Jim Lee's costumes kind of sucked; sorry, millions of X-Men fans who disagree with me...!)

Anyway, these are the X-Men comics that I've read regularly, why I read them and why I thought they might not be quite right to recommend: 

•New X-Men (2001-2004) By the point this book launched, Grant Morrison was my favorite comics writer, and responsible for JLA, which was and still is one of my favorite superhero comics. So, the idea of he and his JLA: Earth-2 collaborator (and Batman: The Scottish Connection artist) Frank Quitely reinventing the X-Men for people who don't read X-Men comics...? That was more than enough to get me to try an X-Men comic...but I also liked that, at the time, Morrison was giving interviews slagging off aspects of the comics, like Wolverine wearing a hat shaped like his hair and the fact that he and Beast have the same hairstyle. 

I think it holds up well, especially given to how tied to the turning of the millennium it was and Morrison and company's efforts to synthesize the original film's more realistic aesthetics into a superhero comic, but given that it's kind of the intentional opposite of '90s X-Men, I'm reluctant to recommend it to fans of X-Men '97 and the like.

•Ultimate X-Men (2001-2003) Like New X-Men, Mark Millar and Andy Kubert's book was presented as an X-Men book for new readers...but perhaps even more so, as it was set in a brand-new fictional "universe" being built from the ground up, completely divorced from the previous decades of Marvel Universe continuity, which Marvel (rightly, I think) thought provided a stumbling block for potential readers. I was a fan of Millar's previous DC writing—I haven't read anything of his since Secret Service, but it seems to me that he started out great and got worse as he his career went on—and only knew Kubert from the first Batman versus Predator miniseries.

I quite liked the Ultimate imprint and read everything for a while. I continued reading for a while after Millar left, reading the Brian Michael Bendis run and ultimately bailing on this book sometime during Brian K. Vaughan's run, I think. Twenty-five years later, I assume there's no real difference in reading a Marvel Universe book and an Ultimate Universe book, though, in terms of accrued continuity. Like, the book was very much of it's time...and that time has passed. 

(Also, that logo sure didn't age well did it...? Like the cover art on that first issue, it looks extremely unappealing to my eye now...)

•X-Force (2001-2002) Even more emblematic of Marvel's then-leadership's willingness to risk breaking things and pissing off fans was this radical book from Peter-Milligan and Mike Allred, the former of whom I knew from DC's Vertigo Comics, and the latter of whom was an artist who I was at that time willing to buy anything he drew. I mean, they didn't just give these two their own X-title, but they had them take over X-Force with its 116th issue. I can't imagine the whiplash. 

The creators would eventually get their own title (X-Statix) and do lots of bold, fun things with it...although I wish they wouldn't have chickened out about using Princess Diana as a character. I followed them on to X-Statix and some of the various miniseries and revisits that followed.

I haven't revisited their work since; I wonder if the superhero reality show premise at the start is dated or not...I thought it felt a bit tired 25 years ago, honestly. Given the fact that, like New X-Men, this was a premeditated curveball thrown at the heads of '90s X-fans, this also doesn't seem like the place to start for the X-curious.

(By the way, I never did figure out how to read Doop speak, but I understand it is figure-out-able, isn't it...?)

•X-Men: Evolution (2002) I wasn't overly enamored with the 2002-2003 animated series that this book was a companion to (It was better than The Animated Series, though! The theme song wasn't as good, of course, but it wasn't a bad theme song, either). The comic was written by Devin Grayson for eight issues though, so that was enough for me to read it. I don't recall particularly liking it, and I assume it's not too terribly appealing to anyone who wasn't a fan of the cartoon.

•Astonishing X-Men (2004-2009) This was another X-Men book sold as one that wasn't necessarily for fans of the X-Men, thought it was more traditional in tone and a more straightforward superhero comic, and thus the realtively rare book that both newcomers and the traditional fanbase could enjoy (At least, I think so; members of the traditional fanbase can correct me if I'm wrong).

TV and movie guy Joss Whedon coming on as writer was the bigger selling point, though, and he was teamed with critically acclaimed artist John Cassaday. After their relatively short run ended, Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi took over. I remember switching from singles to trades part of the way through Whedon's run (Which, if I recally correctly, was rather write-for-the-trade-y). I don't remember anything about Ellis' stories, but I recall Bianchi's art. I think I dropped it while Ellis was still writing it. 

And yes, the book seems like a cursed one looking back from 2006, what with Whedon passing the baton to Ellis. 

•X-Men: First Class (2006-2009) Jeff Parker, the writer of Agents of Atlas, and artist Roger Cruz and others collaborated on a series of mini-series and specials featuring new, fun, often funny adventures set during the first year of the original X-Men line-up of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel and Iceman. Lots of guest-stars and very loose continuity (In fact, I'm not sure if these were meant to be canonical or not; perhaps a real X-Men fan would be able to answer that). I also liked the 2008-2010 Wolverine: First Class series from Fred Van Lente and others.

•Wolverine & The X-Men (2012-2014) Unlike the rest of the books on this list, I didn't buy these individual issues but instead read them in trades from the library. By the point that the title launched, I hadn't read all that much of writer Jason Aaron's Marvel work, but he had a reputation for "awesome" comics featuring their darker, more adult heroes, and I liked all of the artists involved on the book, inside and out. The premise—Wolverine succeeds Charles Xavier as the headmaster of a school for "gifted youngsters"—was irresistible, and I liked Aaron's highly comedic execution. Like Morrsion's New X-Men, it added a lot of new characters via the student body.

I'm sure there were other X books I've read over the years. I know I gave a Peter David X-Factor revival a try based on critical acclaim for the original, for example. I read a Rick Rememder-written X-Force featuring Wolverine, Deadpool, Fantomex and some others in matching costumes. I know I read the Bendis X-Men run for a while, wherein the original teenage X-Men came from the past into the present. I read a book featuring an Avengers/X-Men hybrid team following Avengers Vs. X-Men. But the above are the ones I made a point of following...and still remember fairly well. 

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By the way, I should probably take a moment to acknowledge the best answer to the question of where to start with a particular superhero comic: Anywhere.

Like, just pick one up and start reading. If it's well made enough that it interests you and makes you want to know what happens next (and/or what came before), it will inspire you to keep reading.

I mean, I started reading comics in general with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #2 (Not #1, but #2). I started reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with some short stories published in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness role-playing game source book. I got into regularly reading Batman and the mainstream DC Universe with a trio of annuals from a crossover event series presenting alternate futures of the characters (Detective Comics Annual #4, Batman Annual #15 and Superman Annual #3...still love those gloves...!)

The great thing about comics is that one inevitably leads to another, as you follow a character or "universe" or publisher or writer or artist from one book to the next.

My sister did take my nephew to the closest comic shop—with some trepidation, as she has helped me move more than once, and has thus seen and carried boxes and boxes of graphic novels and longboxes full of bagged and boarded comics books, and knows what starting reading comics as a teenager can lead to—and he showed me the half dozen or so comic book-comics he bought, including from the dollar bin. 

The X-Men comic he's starting with? Fabian Nicieza and Andy Kubert's The Amazing X-Men #4 from 1994, which seems to be part of "The Age of Apocalypse" event storyline. (I wonder if it was Kubert's drawing of Storm's naked shoulder on the cover that drew him to that particular comic...?)

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Anyway, below is what I ended up ordering from the library for my nephew. You'll notice a few points of overlap with what I've read before. In the near future, I plan to read (or re-read) all of the books below, and I'll write about that experience in the future).

•X-Men: First Class—Mutants 101 (2022) Collecting 2006's X-Men: First Class #1-8 and 2007's X-Men: First Class Special, all written by Jeff Parker and mostly penciled by Roger Cruz (Paul Smith penciled #6, and the special featured pencils from Smith, Kevin Nowlan, Colleen Coover and Nick Dragotta). 

I assume most X-Men fans wouldn't consider this X-Men: First Class an essential book in terms of the overall X-Men mega-story and lore, but I have to assume that if a teenager in the '20s wants to read about the founding X-Men line-up, they will have an easier time with this than trying to slog through the original 1960s comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Plus, I know from experience that these are fun and funny, and rather continuity light...that is, one doesn't really need to know or have read anything in particular to follow them, nor do they weave a bigger, more complex story from issue-to-issue. 

In these comics, the founding five face such villains as Juggernaut, The Sentinels, Spidey's foe The Lizard and The Skrulls and they team-up with the likes of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange, Thor and Gorilla-Man (from Paker's own Agents of Atlas).

The book ends with pretty expansive profiles of Professor X and his X-Men, giving their stats and histories and ranking their powers and abilities. I assume this is useful to someone just getting into the X-Men, right? This is certainly the sort of thing I loved when I first started comics.

•Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1: Gifted (2014) Collecting the first six issues of TV and movie guy (and apparent terrible person) Joss Whedon and the late John Cassaday's 2004 series. Despite my reluctance to promote the work of Whedon, this is one of those relatively rare X-Men books that seemed created from the ground up to be new reader friendly, and, if I recall correctly, was at the time something of a compromise between the New X-Men era's more realistic (and high-quality) direction and the action-packed, superhero stuff of the '90s; a book for fans of the '90s X-Men cartoon and the first movies, then.

"Time to make nice with the public, eh, Summers?" Wolverine asks during a suiting-up sequence.

"We have to do more than that, Logan," Scott says, concluding his sentence on a two-page splash page revealing the team in their costumes for the first time in the book, "We have to astonish them."

Flipping through this again now—I haven't read it since I did so in singles over 20 years ago now—I'm struck by how many of the images I remember clearly. Cassaday's work on this title is quite incredible, and there's an awful lot of specific panels, poses and spreads that are just plain burned into my memory.

Anyway, Cyclops, Wolverine, The Beast, Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde star in a story involving the promise of a "mutant cure" and a new alien menace. Plus, Colossus comes back to life after what seems to me like a rather long time for an X-Man to be dead (but maybe not?), and there's a dramatic, silent two-page spread where we throws Wolverine at something. I always like when they do that. 

•Wolverine and The X-Men By Jason Aaron Vol. 1 (2012) Collecting 2011's Wolverine & The X-Men #1-4  by Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Nick Bradshaw and others. With the X-Men bickering and split into factions—I think this was one of those times Professor X was dead, and during the time that Cyclops was a terrorist or whatever?—Logan is the new headmaster of the newly re-named mutant school, The Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. Plenty of familiar faces make up the teaching staff, including Kitty Pryde, Beast, Iceman and even Doop. 

From what I recall, this was basically a comedic, occasionally even sticom-like take on the New X-Men concept, with the X-Men splitting their duties between superheroing and teaching a student body full of young mutants. Also, lots of new characters among those younger students, not all of whom were necessarily mutants. 

As such, it seems to be a pretty good jumping-on point—and it ran long enough that there's a big, satisfying chunk of it—although I wonder if it spinning out of a particular point in X-Men history might mean that it doesn't age particularly well? At least in terms of it being so different from the current status quo...? 

•Uncanny X-Men by Gail Simone Vol. 1: Red Wave (2025) Collecting 2004's Uncanny X-Men #1-6 by Gail Simone and pencil artist David Marquez (Javier Garron draws the sixth issue). I haven't read much of Gail Simone's Marvel work, but I was a fan of her team books for DC Comics over the years (Her first runs on Birds of Prey and Secret Six, anyway), and I think she's a really great, craftsperson style writer. Her work is often fun and funny, and she's good at relationships and team dynamics and if every story isn't always a great one, it's never a bad one, either; like, I've never regretted buying or reading a Simone book for the writing.

Also, she just seems like a really nice lady.

So Simone on the X-Men seemed like a good move on Marvel's part...even though I didn't pick it up,  my disinterest in the X-Men cancelling out my interest in Simone.

This seemed like a good choice for my nephew though, as not only do I trust Simone to create good comics, but it's one of the current ongoing titles and it has a small cast of some of the better-known characters, even if you only know the team from the cartoons and movies: Wolverine, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Jubilee (Heck, they're all well-known enough that you can just look at the trade's cover and recognize each of them by their hands...or tail, in Kurt's case). 

•X-Men by Jed MacKay Vol. 1: Homecoming (2025) Collecting 2024's X-Men #1-7, by writer Jed MacKay and pencil artists Ryan Stegman and Netho Diaz.

This wasn't on my radar at all, and I'm not super-familiar with MacKay (I have liked all the Stegman art I've seen, though), but Kiel Phegley suggested it on Bluesky when I was crowd-sourcing suggestions, and it has the advantage of being one of the current iterations of the team (Unless it's changed since this book shipped, I guess). Also, Cyclops is in it, and my nephew did say he likes Cyclops. 

I haven't read it yet, but the team seems to be more...idiosyncratic than that of the Simone book. Aside from Cyclops, I recognize The Beast, Juggernaut and Magik from the cover; the back cover says the lady with the pink sword is Psylocke and the kid with pink hair is Kid Omega (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Quentin Quire). Some investigation reveals that the person on the ice bridge is Temper. As for the bald guy with black eyes...no clue. Maybe just a random mutant they are protecting...? Also, while he's not on the cvoer, Magneto is also in the book.

Flipping through, it looks rather nineties-ish...which I imagine is probably appealing to many modern X-Men readers, picking up the comics because they like X-Men '97 and Rivals or whatever...

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Before I started thinking too hard about what to recommend, I asked my nephew for some more information that could potentially guide me.

"Are there any particular characters you are interested in?" I texted him. "Or line-ups? Or eras or artists or storylines...?"

When he responded, he answered with characters beyond just the X-Men:

i like cyclops, wolverine a lot. also magneto. i'm also interested in any spider man ones.

...

also am big fan of night wing.

In quoting his text here, I obviously didn't add a hyphen to "spider man" nor smooth "night wing"  together into one word, in order to better express where my nephew is as a superhero fan (Or maybe a texter?). 

As he had a birthday coming up a few weeks after that exchange, I went to the Barnes and Noble down the street from my library to look for some Spider-Man and Nightwing books, which seemed easier for me to pick out than X-Men ones.

I had posted about this on Bluesky at the time, but I was kind of shocked at how poor the American superhero comic book selection in general was, as it had shrunk by at least half since the last time I looked at it. Meanwhile, the manga section seemed to have doubled in size (Honestly, just eyeballing it I think the store had more shelf space devoted to volumes of Jujutsu Kaisen than to all Marvel comics).

There were only a handful of Spider-Man books, and the only ones there—Spider-Man: The Other and Spider-Man: Blue (although the spine just said "Spider-Man") and the Marvel Premier version of Spider-Men: Worlds Collide (although the spine just said "Spider-Man")—didn't seem like good starting points. 

I ended up only buying one book there and then ordering two others from online. If you're curious, here's what I got him for his birthday: 

•Nightwing: Leaping Into the Light: DC Compact Comics Edition (2026) I love these things, as they are extremely cheap (Just $9.99! The cost of two and half brand-new comic books!) and they are mostly focused on evergreen "classic" DC comics, the very sorts of comics you would gift someone curious about a particular character. (The only thing I don't like about the line? All of the books they've published so far have been ones I've already read in singles or trades). I had previously bought my nephew the Compact Comics Editions of Batman: Hush and Batman: The Long Halloween when he had requested various Batman books a few months back (At that price point, they make for a good impulse buy, too).  

This collects the first 11 issues of Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo and company's acclaimed recent Nightwing run (Or the first two trade collections). I think it's unusual among the Compact Comics line in that its contents are of more recent vintage than most of the other comics collected. 

Anyway, I read at least the first half of this in a trade previously and liked it just fine. I do wonder if it's the best place to start with Nightwing but, well, I feel like he's a character whose history is, at least in the broad strokes, relatively simple—the original Robin and long-time Teen Titan as a grown-up, now serving as the vigilante protector of his own city—and my nephew knows him from various Batman cartoons (In fact, when he was still young enough to have themed birthday parties, he asked for a Nightwing party one year. Not Batman, to my sister's frustration, as there are plenty of decorations and party favors related to Batman, but Nightwing. My niece/his sister diligently created a string of flags with Nightwing symbols on them). 

Oh, this is the one I found at Barnes and Noble, by the way.

•Nightwing Vol. 1: Bludhaven (2025) I was reluctant to buy a Chuck Dixon comic, but then I convinced myself that the only problem with Dixon is that he has terrible politics, and compared to the likes of other comics creators, well, he didn't commit any crimes or abuse anyone, so...it could be worse? (In fact, I've already mentioned several other terrible human beings in this very post!) Also, it seems hard to avoid Dixon if one wants to read about Nightwing. 

Looking online, it seems like most of—maybe all?—of his long run on the title has been collected into huge compendium editions, but a 1000-page book seems like a bad thing to hand someone who is still comics-curious. 

This particular collects the first eight issues of the Dixon and Scott McDaniel run, which launched the ongoing Nightwing series way back in 1996. It also, to my surprise, contains a 1995 four-issue Nightwing miniseries by Denny O'Neil and Greg Land (from back when Land's art still looked like it was drawn by hand). 

I've never read this mini, but, flipping through it, I noticed it opens with Nightwing in one of his older costumes, and he has comically long hair, which he wears down when he's Dick Grayson  and in a three-foot long ponytail when he's Nightwing. Hopefully the hair—and Dick's fashion!—won't scare my nephew away...

•Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) This is a brand-new $9.99 collection of 11 issues of Amazing-Spider-Man from the rebooted "Brand New Day" era. If you haven't run across this in the wild, it's the same size as the DC Compact Comics and Marvel Premier Editions, just lacking the trade dress of the latter. 

I was not a fan of the reboot, which I think "broke" Spider-Man in the same way that the New 52 broke several characters and franchises...or, at the very least, caused my interest in them to evaporate. While there were a lot of talented folks involved during that period of Spider-Man and I picked up issues here and there based on the artists, flipping through this now, I don't think I actually read any of this.

Still, it is a starting point, and it is being marketed as such, and, well, there aren't a lot of such entry points to the character. Unlike, say, Batman, Spider-Man doesn't seem to have a Dark Knight Returns or a Batman: Year One (Or an Arkham Asylum or a Gothic or a Long Halloween or a Hush or a Court of Owls or...), so I went with this. 

I see that it features Wolverine (on page 3!) and The Punisher, so I'm sure it should prove exciting enough to a newer, teenage reader (Also The Shocker and J. Jonah Jameson, but I can't imagine the boy likes those two as much as his uncle does).

Oh, and there's art from Chris Bachalo and Marcos Martin, which are two artists I am more than happy to stick in the face of a new reader...

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🤔 In retrospect, I wonder if I should have just given him some Doom Patrol comics and feigned ignorance of the difference. "What do you mean? You wanted the comics about an old guy in a wheelchair leading a group of super-powered freaks that launched in the 1960s, right...?"

DC Versus Marvel Pt. 5: Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1

While I was quite enthusiastic about the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, it was more so about the collection as a whole, and of finally having access to all of the comics within it, rather than genuine excitement for each and every story contained within. In fact, some of the stories I wasn't really looking forward to at all, and I ended up approaching them with the same sense of anticipation that I used to have for doing homework. 

One of those particular crossovers was Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, a 1982 special produced in-house at Marvel that would bring together the two publishers then quite popular team of young-ish heroes. 

Why the reluctance on my part? Well, while the teams and their respective comic books may have been pretty popular with the readers of their time, they weren't popular with me personally, as I wouldn't even start reading comics for about another decade after this was published (I was only five years old in 1982).

I have of course read some X-Men runs in the years since, but only ones that tended to try and reinvent the concept and reach new readers. Think the millennial Ultimate X-Men and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's New X-Men and then, later, Jeff Parker and company's X-Men: First Class and Jason Aaron's Wolverine and the X-Men. I made a few attempts in the early years of the new millennium to get into the classic, Chris Claremont iteration of the team, via an Essential volume and other comics borrowed from the Columbus Metropolitan Library, but I just couldn't do it, and so much of my understanding of X-Men epics and various tropes came secondhand, filtered through the 1997 cartoon and the various films.

Similarly, I've never read any of the Marv Wolfman-written, George Perez-drawn Titans comics; I am far more familiar with and affectionate for the weird-ass, post-Zero Hour Arsenal-lead team that Wolfman was writing in the pages of New Titans #0-#130 (of which I wouldn't mind a trade of, by the way!) in the late '90s than of the previous iterations. Certainly DC has done a decent job of keeping those Wolfman/Perez comics available to new readers over the years—there's a DC Finest collection of The Judas Contract scheduled for a February release—but I never felt the urge to pick any of them up.

Basically, both teams are somewhat unfamiliar and unwelcoming to me, so the thought of them teaming up in one comic didn't do much for me personally.

You know what that means, of course. My expectations for the book were quite low going into it, and therefore I had managed to set myself up nicely to be quite pleasantly surprised. The story, unimaginatively titled "Apokalips...Now" (But maybe it was the first to make that particular allusion...?), and weirdly, almost randomly featuring Darkseid as the villain of the piece, turned out to be a quite well-made comic book.

In the end, it didn't matter that I wasn't a fan of any of the characters, or that I wasn't clued in on the various ongoing soap operas that I associated with the two teams. Their crossover was accessible and ultimately enjoyable, expertly drawn by the great Walt Simonson, here credited as penciler "Walter Simonson", with Terry Austin credited as "Finisher".

As to how Simonson got the job, it sounds like there may have been a wee bit of nepotism involved. The writer was Chris Claremont, one of the two most obvious choices for the gig given the fact that he was then currently writing one of the two starring teams. In his introduction to the story, written like so many of these for the pages of 1991 collection Crossover Classics and reprinted in the new omnibus, Claremont said he was in the middle of explaining his idea for the story to editor Louise Simonson when Walt, Louise's husband, poked his head into the office and said, "Did somebody mention Darkseid?" He followed that up fairly quickly with another question, "Need an artist?"

And so Marvel had its assignment to bring the two teams together, the outline of a plot and its creative team all lined up.

What did they come up with? 

Well, as mentioned a few times already, Claremont chose to use Darkseid as his villain. This was not an obvious or even likely choice. Though Jack Kirby had created the character and made him into one of DC Comics' most potent and compelling villains in his 1971-launched suite of comics which would come to be known as his Fourth World saga, he was far from a Titans villain. 

Even almost a decade after his creation, he hadn't yet met the Titans or any of their members, who don't seem to have any experience with the forces of Apokolips here, being confused by the appearance of a detachment of Darkseid's Parademons.

Darkseid faced off against the Justice League in a three-issue arc of their title in 1980 after a 1977 Gerry Conway-written revival of Kirby's New Gods storyline, but it would be a few more years before he appeared in kids' television sets as part of 1984's Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show. In 1982, then, he was still very much a New Gods, Justice League or maybe Superman villain, rather than the sort of all-purpose DCU villain he would eventually become, as Kirby's mythology became more and more ingrained in the DC Comics line. 

Regardless, he was a cool character, and one Claremont apparently wanted to write badly enough to include him here, that inclusion being somewhat justified by the cosmic nature of the plot. After all, the X-Men villain chosen was, as seen on the cover above, was the Dark Phoenix, here resurrected via Darkseid's otherworldly technology.

Claremont did of course include a more traditional Titans foe in the proceedings, with Darkseid hiring mercenary Deathstroke, The Terminator to lead his Parademons on their mission.

After reading the story, I do wonder to what degree it was Darkseid's presence that drew Walt Simonson into the project. An obvious Kirby fan, one of the most notable works on his resume was his years-long run on Thor, which he began relatively shortly after this book was published and, of course, in 2000 he would write and draw a short-lived Orion ongoing series for DC.  Of the many artists to follow in Kirby's footsteps, drawing the characters, worlds and technology that Kirby originated, Simonson is undoubtedly one of the best, and Claremont's tale gives him plenty of opportunities to offer his own spin on Kirby staples.

The book opens, in fact, with the tiny, almost microscopic Darkseid and Metron on a small asteroid before the Source Wall, which fills much of the page, the former speechifying, "Behold the Promethean Giants--"

It's a great page, and it's really too bad that though this is the fourth official DC/Marvel crossover, it is also the first to not be printed in tabloid or "treasury" format but was instead a regularly sized comic book (albeit a longer, 64-page one). In addition to those New Gods and the Parademons, Simonson would get to draw Boom Tubes, several splashes of the Source Wall, the Omega Effect, dog soldiers and Apokolips itself, as seen from space.

That's all in addition, of course, to the Titans/X-Men business.

After striking his bargain with Darkseid, Metron attempts to pierce the Wall, leaving his throne-like flying chair (which Charles Xavier has claimed on the cover), floating behind while Darkseid makes a fist and fills a panel with big, red "HA HA HA"s. 

On Earth, we meet the X-Men at Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, while Colossus, Wolverine and Nightcrawler train in the Danger Room (and Simonson draws a great fastball special, with Wolvie attaining a pretty perfect sphere shaped). Kitty Pryde, Cyborg and Storm are all introduced in quick succession, with Claremont and Simonson demonstrating each of their superpowers in the process.

That night, a mysterious figure with a strange apparatus on his gloved hand appears in each of their rooms, extracting thoughts of the late Jean Grey from each. Kitty wakes up in the process, glimpsing a grinning Darkseid above her and screaming, and the various pajama-clad X-Men all rush into action, with Cyclops ultimately being visited by an apparition of Jean. 

Meanwhile, no one's resting all that easy at Titans Tower, either. Oh, by the way, this is yet another DC/Marvel crossover that just assumes that the various characters' adventures take place in the same world, our own, and that they have just never crossed paths before. Claremont, like Shooter in the second Superman/Spider-Man team-up, even has a character remarking on it, as when Cyborg swings by skyscraper that "got trashed by the X-Men" and he thinks to himself, "I wonder why the Titans have never tangled with 'em?"

Anyway, Raven wakes up Starfire and Changeling in the tower when she has a nightmare about a giant cosmic bird of flame, which Starfire recognizes as the entity Phoenix, a danger to all life in the universe (Coming from outer space, she's apparently familiar with it). An emergency meeting is called, and the various other Titans introduced: Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Cyborg and, lastly, Robin, who is unable to answer the summons after discovering a "Para-Demon" and briefly fighting Deathstroke. (Yes, there's a hyphen in Parademon here, and there seems to be one on every instance of the word.)

The Titans decide to start their search for the Phoenix with the X-Men, as "a woman code-named Phoenix used to be affiliated with them." They storm Xavier's school but are soon attacked by a contingent of Parademons and captured. 

Meanwhile, the X-Men visit Jean's parents, who also saw an apparition of her, and then visit sites where Jean had previously exhibited her Phoenix powers, running into Deathstroke and another contingent of Parademons there. They too are beaten and captured. (If you're wondering who would win in a fight between Wolverine and Deathstroke, they have a two-panel fight here, wherein Wolverine knocks him down but not out; Wolvie is eventually felled by a Parademon-thrown "toxi-cloud grenade.")

Both teams of hostages are Boom Tubed to a floating piece of rock before the Source Wall, where they are put in an elaborate machine, and Darkseid reveals what he's been up to with gathering the essences of Phoenix, ultimately resurrecting her and then taking her hand. He monologues for about a half-dozen panels about how he plans to use her and her power to create a new, second Apokolips out of Earth. He will do so using her vast cosmic powers for...manual labor, I guess, as she will be tunnelling through the Earth to form fire pits (Claremont uses the term "Apokolips Pits") to kickstart the Apokolipsification of the world. 

While the bad guys split and leave our many heroes in outer space to perish, the two teams wake up, free themselves, set eyes on one another and...completely fail to come to blows. Instead, there's a splash page where the two teams face one another, Robin and Cyclops shaking hands. "I suggest an alliance," Cyclops says. "My sentiments, exactly," Robin responds.

That's...unusual, and not what we've come to expect either from the standard superhero team-up, or the cross-company ones we've gotten so far. After some working together, which seems to include Kitty and Changeling flirting ("She seems very attracted to Changeling-- I did not think that would upset me so," Colossus thinks to himself), they find Metron's Mobius Chair and Xavier realizes it can be controlled telepathically.

Soon, they arrive on Earth, and travel underground for their big showdown with the bad guys. It's a pretty fun, well-drawn sequence, and it was genuinely kind of shocking to see the various characters dogpiling Darkseid, who is so far out of...well, all of their weight classes, really. 

The battle is finally resolved when Dark Phoenix starts to dissipate and takes a physical form by possessing Cyclops: "Come my once and former love-- --Embrace your destiny!" she says as she flies into him, and his costume transforms, gaining a Phoenix sigil on its chest.

Ultimately, the Phoenix-possessed Cyclops whips off his visor and fires a huge ruby-colored bird of flame at Darkseid, who stands there with his hands behind his back. There's a terrific explosion, and then both he and the Phoenix are gone, the giant bird streaking into space with a tiny Darkseid in her talon. 

He'll end up embedded in the Source Wall with the Promethean Giants...and not for the last time, though it is a fitting "final" fate for the character...and it certainly seems like that is exactly what it is here. 

Meanwhile, the two teams get a few panels of quiet hang-out time. 

They were apparently destined to meet again. Marv Wolfman wrote in his 1991 Crossover Classics  introduction to "The Heroes and the Holocaust" from Marvel Treasury Edition #28 that he was slated to write a second Titans/X-Men team-up, "but just before we were supposed to go into production, DC and Marvel decided to end the crossovers for the foreseeable future."  

What happened, exactly? It doesn't seem like it was because "Apokolips...Now" was a bad story, certainly not that I could tell from reading it some four decades later, so it was presumably something behind the scenes, and, one can intuit from a prose piece Mike Carlin contributes to the omnibus about the resumption of the inter-company crossovers almost a decade later, it had to do with the leaders at the respective publishers in 1982 and their "us vs. them" mentality.*

It's kind of too bad, as not only would it have been interesting to see what Titans writer Wolfman could have done with the X-Men characters, but his collaborator on New Teen Titans was slated to draw it. Together with the proposed and aborted Justice League of America/Avengers crossover, that makes two DC/Marvel super-team crossovers with Perez art we almost got. (Unlike the JLoA/Avengers project, though, Perez apparently never produced any art for the X-Men/Titans one.)

Whatever happened exactly, it was the end of a brief era for DC and Marvel. But not the final end. Thirteen years later, in 1994, the crossovers would resume, with the very, very weird pairing of Marvel's Punisher with DC's...Jean-Paul Valley, the guy filling in as the new Batman...?

Next: 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1

*It doesn't take too much Googling to turn up information on why cooperation on crossovers from the two publishers fell apart around that time. I don't want to provide any links, because the last thing I want to do is get involved in any such conversation about disagreements that publishing executives, editors and comics creators might have had while I was in kindergarten, but from what I've read, it certainly appears to be a matter of the publishers not being able to come to an agreement on the Justice League/Avengers comic in a timely enough fashion to save it when things started going wrong.

These are some of the Marvel collections I've read lately:

All-New X-Men: Inevitable Vol. 1–The Ghosts of Cyclops

Some eight months or so have passed since the end of the previous volume of All-New X-Men, and something very dramatic has happened involving Cyclops, The Inhumans and the Terrigen Mists during that time–something that lead to Cyclops' death and the whole world hating and fearing him all over again.

That gap, and the mysterious events that occurred during it, have allowed writer Dennis Hopeless to begin his new volume of the title somewhat in media res. The first half of this six-issue collection is essentially a putting-the-team-together story, while the second half sets up their new status quo and sets them against some classic X-Men villains.

Hopeless has inherited not only the title, but also most of the cast of Brian Michael Bendis' series: The original five X-Men, who were pulled from the past to the present in order to try and talk sense to grown-up Cyclops, and not only did they fail, but they all got stuck here.

Of those five, Teen Jean is MIA (she's appearing in Jeff Lemire's Extraordinary X-Men, which is by far the less interesting and entertaining of the two books, at least in my opinion). Teen Iceman is hanging out in Austin, Texas. Teen Angel is still dating Laura, former X-23 and current All-New Wolverine, and they are hanging out in Vail, Colorado. Teen Beast is driving around the country in a VW bus-pulled camper called The Nerd Wagon, which has a Bamf-powered engine that allows them to teleport as need be. For reasons never made clear, recent Jean Grey School graduates Evan and Idie are with him (All that Teen Beast and friends would seem to have in common with these two X-teens are their relative ages; they never really hung out with them in the previous volume of All-New X-Men or in Wolverine and The X-Men).

Those two really stick out because, unlike Laura, who was part of Bendis' team, they are new, seemingly random additions, and Hopeless hasn't made much of a case for either of them being needed here. Idie at least brings some diversity to the otherwise all-white, mostly male team, but Evan? Well, I suspect he's here because the next collection will feature an Apocalypse-related cross-over, but I guess that remains to be seen.

Oh, and what of Teen Cyclops? Well, he's half laying low, dodging his friends and any attention, given the fact that his grown-up self went on to do...something pretty bad (And he'd already conquered the world and killed Charles Xavier in Avengers Vs. X-Men, becoming a wanted terrorist). But he's also tracking some new gang of mutants calling themselves "The Ghosts of Cyclops"; they don masks reminiscent of Cyke's last mask, speechify and basically just knock around tables and commit petty crime.

Teen Cyclops obviously takes that pretty personally, and sets about trying to take them down solo. He does pretty well too, given that they are just a group of untrained college kids with no real idea what they are doing, but he gets in over his head enough that the rest of the team unites to help him and, eventually, make him realize that he needs them after all.

From there, they become a more-or-less normal supehero team, teleporting all over the world to save people from natural disasters and the like. In Paris they run into The Blob, here given a fun, funny motivation for a life of crime, and Hopeless toys with the idea that their old enemy has had years to become a better, more experienced fighter, one used to trading blows with the more powerful adult versions of the X-Men, while they are still essentially "Year One" era teenagers who have yet to log many hours in the Danger Room (This is perhaps somewhat undercut by the idea that the X-Teens have been here a good long while now and should have gotten used to the idea of not underestimating the modern versions of losers from their past, and the presence of Laura and Angel's Black Vortex power upgrade).

The volume ends with a cliffhanger, as Toad too is in Paris, and attacks and kidnaps one of these X-Men, which seems to be in sharp contrast to the more benign Toad of Jason Aaron's Wolverine and The X-Men but, again, who knows what happened during the eight-month gap.

Hopeless seems very much dedicated to the idea of an old-school, classic superhero team comic here, as is readily apparent by the fact that he's not writing for the trade, as there's a three-issue arc and another that is at least four issues long, only the first three chapters of which appear here.

Additionally, each of the characters has a sub-plot of some sort that isn't bound to the particular story arc, but continues as a through line in all of these issues, and will likely to continue to do so. The most prominent of these is probably the tension between Angel and Wolverine; All-New Wolverine seems intent on taking point in any and all dangerous situations in a way that is reckless to the point of seeming insane. As when she throws herself off a cliff to beat Angel to the bottom of the hill while skiing. For fun.

Obviously, Angel has a hard time watching his girlfriend constantly taking bullets and setting herself on fire, and more than once vomits at the violence she subjects herself to, on the belief that her healing factor will help her recover from anything. Having also recently read the first collection of All-New Wolverine (and the annual, which was fun and funny), this portrayal seems somewhat at odds with how she appears in her own book, but, as with all of the sub-plots, it's a story-in-progress.

Hopeless is lucky enough to be working with pencil artist Mark Bagley (inked here by Andrew Hennessy), and not only has Bagley's career made him pretty much the ideal candidate for a Marvel comic featuring teen heroes and/or classic, old-school superheroics, but he's one of the few artists who is fast enough that he doesn't need fill-in artists to help him make a monthly, or even a more-than-monthly schedule, so that this collection is all Bagley and Hennessy, from start to finish.

I'm not sure why the book is called All-New X-Men: Inevitable on the spine and in the fine print but not the actual covers of the actual comics, but I suppose at the very least it will help separate it from the other collections of All-New X-Men with the same volume numbers on the spines of the collections.

Of the three books featuring X-Men teams Marvel is currently publishing, this is my favorite, and the one I would recommend, on the strength of its relative quality and its distancing itself from any X-Men mega-plot involving M-Pox and Inhumans and whatnot (The third, Uncanny X-Men, is drawn by Greg Land, so I didn't even bother looking at that one, nor will I).

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol. 2–Supersonic

So different was this second collection of Charles Soule's Daredevil run that I actually had to check the spine a few times to make sure that this was, indeed, the second volume of the series I had previously read, rather than the third. While that first volume read like a graphic novel, this one reads like a few chapters of one, and is different enough from that last volume that it honestly felt like I had missed a half-dozen issues or so.

Right from the first issue–or the cover, actually–we find ourselves in familiar, over-played Daredevil territory, with Elektra. In a two-part story, drawn not by Ron Garney, but Matteo Buffagani, Elektra attempts to kill Daredevil because she thinks he has done something with her daughter, who may or may not be Matt Murdock's. Matt, like the reader, didn't even know she had a daughter, and, it turns out, she didn't–it was some sorta mind control business to get her to kill Daredevil.

Blindspot, Daredevil's new sidekick introduced last volume, appears but briefly. Long enough to slow down a killing blow from Elektra, and get his arm broken for his effort. He later appears in a page set at Night Nurse's clinic. (Yay! Night Nurse!). With the post-Secret Wars Daredevil having his secret identity back, he and Elektra are on some particularly weird footing, as he knows she used to know, and now she doesn't, which he realizes puts her in sort of a horrible spot (She thought she was cheating on him...with himself). Soule commits a fairly cardinal sin of these sorts of soft reboot/continuity-altering shenanigans: If you have to deal with them at all, for God's sake, don't dwell on them. The next two issues, he dwells on them some more, however.

In those, drawn by Goran Sudzuka rather than Ron Garney, Matt goes to Macau to use his powers to win a ton of money at poker in a casino, which is all part of an elaborate–but fun to read!–plan to get to stay at a particular floor of a hotel, close enough to a briefcase full of something mysterious he needs, that has something to do with the Elektra story (He later says what is in the case, but it seems like he may have been lying). Spider-Man shows up for this story, as in the Peter Parker version, and Spidey knows something's not quite right with Daredevil, but he can't put his finger on it. Because Spidey too used to know Daredevil's secret identity, and know doesn't, and so there is still more talk of this (and a fun little game of keep-away as Spidey tries to press the issue).

This is actually the first time I've read a story featuring the new, post-Secret Wars Spidey and I'm not sure how I feel about that glowing costume. It's looked just fine on the Alex Ross-painted covers I've seen, but looks kind of weird and awkward here.

And that is that. Rounding out the collection if Daredevil Annual #1, which features a 20-page lead story written by Soule and a 10-page back-up by an entirely different creative team. They are unrelated to one another, an unrelated to the four issues of the main series that preceded them.

The longer, Soule-written story is a team-up with Echo in which they encounter a new form of Klaw, who spreads himself like an infection, transforming anyone who hears him into sound wave people. Echo, being deaf, is conveniently immune. She goes to Daredevil and the Emergency Broadcast System for help. It's a fine little story, mostly notable for artist Vanessa R. Del Rey's squiggly artwork and dramatic, elaborate lay-outs (My favorite part is a minor, silly detail, in which Echo seems to stop and take the time to tie feathers into the bandages she wraps around her forearms for absolutely no reason other than the fact that it's kinda sorta her costume; it's not like she dons a mask or any sort of identity-concealing, practical gear.

The 10-pager that closes out the volume is by writer Roger McKenzie and artist Ben Torres, and functions as a kinda sorta origin story for some dumb villain named Gladiator with circular saw blades mounted on his forearms. Torres only rarely seems to draw them in motion, which seems like it defeats the purpose of having such blades mounted on your forearms. It's not a bad story, but it's not a good one either; one imagines we'll be seeing the character in the future, as otherwise this is just kind of a head-scratching page-filler that helps justify using the Echo story in an annual instead of holding it as a fill-in issue.

So no Garney, almost no Blindspot, no complete story and predictable Daredevil enemies and allies–aside from the new costume and color scheme, this second collection was almost nothing that the first volume was, and suffered accordingly.

E Is For Extinction: Warzones

There is a sort of almost essential element of pointlessness to all of Marvel's 2015 Secret Wars tie-ins, which were almost all "What If...?"-style miniseries meant to kill time and fill slots in the publishing schedule, but that pointlessness could be insidious, as it could make one wonder what about these random, non-canonical miniseries was really any more pointless than any other super-comic? The whole endeavor, as much fun and as well-made as many of these series were, brought with it a sort of existentialist dread.

This one's a good example.

Its writers Chris Burnham and Dennis Culver and artist Ramon Villalobos doing an extended riff on Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's 2001 relaunch of the X-Men franchise, taking as its title that of New X-Men's first story arc. A decade and a half later, that three-year Morrison run (Quitely didn't stick around for much of it), seems stronger now than it was then, and then it was like a punch in the face (Here I might suggest you go read Paul O'Brien's review of this collection, as he is the best writer about the X-Men I know of, and does a far better job of contextualizing New X-Men in franchise history than I ever could).

But what's the point of it, other than to remind readers how great Morrison and Quitely's run was? To pull out old costumes and concepts, point at them and say, "This was cool, wasn't it?" To maybe try and condense the broad themes and storytelling models of that series into just 80 pages?

I'm not sure there is one. I'll be damned if it wasn't fun to revisit that era and its concepts, anyway.

Zagging where New X-Men zigged, Charles Xavier shoots himself in the head with two guns to get Cassandra Nova out of his head. Why two guns? Because that makes an artful, X-shaped blood splatter on the blank wall in one of those big, clean, Quitely-like settings.

From there, we jump ahead an undisclosed amount of years into the future ("X Years Later," naturally). Now Magneto  has opened "The Atom Institute," and he leads a new team of New X-Men: Beak, Angel, Glob, Quentin Quire, Basilisk, The Stepford Cuckoos, Dust, Ernst and Martha. Meanwhile, the surviving "old" New X-Men–Cyclops, Wolverine, Emma Frost and Beast–struggle with their fading powers and feelings of irrelevance. They are here cast as the Neanderthals, and Magneto's students as the homo sapiens in the evolutionary metaphor that Morrison pursued.

The U-Men, District X, Xorn, evil white Beast, the Phoenix business, Wolverine killing Jean Grey, plus all those other characters previously mentioned, plus the costumes and colors and concepts of New X-Men...this is the comic book equivalent of a cover song, maybe a concept album full of covers from another band. It works. But it makes me feel weird though, as I contemplate meaning vis a vis superhero comics books.

Included in the back, in large part to give this enough pages to be collected into a trade, is the first issue of Morrison and Quitely's New X-Men run. In part, this is a smart move, as it provides a great bridge. Like what you just got done reading? Well, here's the first issue of the run that inspired it. Like that? Then you, my friend, need to invest in some trades.

On the other hand, it underscores how different Villalobos art actually is from Quitely's, something that's not as readily apparent when you're not looking at them side by side. DC should get Villalobos to do his Quitely impression for some Superman and Batman and Robin books.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1: The Boys are Back In Town

Well this was a blast.

David Walker and Sanford Greene reunite the original Heroes For Hire for...well, for no reason, really. Mostly because Iron Fist wants to re-team with his best friend Luke Cage to have adventures together all the time again, but Luke's grown-up and has a wife (Jessica Jones) and kid (Danielle) to take care of.

The pair meet to pick up their old Heroes For Hire secretary or administrative assistant (depending on who you ask) when she's released from prison, take her out for dinner and help her recover a necklace of her grandmother's that fell into the hands of a notorious Marvel gangster.

It turns out to be a lot less simple than that, as their friend turns out to be in cahoots with bad guy Black Mariah (this version quite different than the corrupt politician version on Netfliex's Luke Cage) and the necklace turning out to be the fabled street magic artifact The Supersoul Stone. Suddenly, a bunch of minor Marvel villains of the mostly silly variety are gunning for Luke and Danny.

While the plot is played pretty straight, Walker seems to have taken some delight in rounding up off-beat characters to throw at his heroes, some of whom only make cameos. The dialogue is quick and clever in buddy cop movie fashion, with much of the tension coming not from any kind of racial dynamic, but because of the fact that the heroes are in such different places in their lives and, while they enjoy one another's company and have history, they aren't exactly on the same page any more.

Regarding racial dynamics, Walker touches on it with the whole idea of "street magic" and the Supersoul Stone, something that Luke insists everyone in Harlem has grown-up hearing about, but which rich white guys Iron Fist and even the Sorcerer Supreme himself Doctor Strange have never even heard of ("There are as many forms of the mystical arts as there are martial arts, and no practitioner of either can master all," Strange tells them, "Nor are all worthy of mastering.")

Luckily neighborhood magician Senor Magico is there to set them straight.

Greene's art, like Walker's dialogue and character choices, tends towards the light. His Cage is pretty much a walking sight gag, drawn as enormous, almost elaphantine in size, and generally stuck in small spaces, like a booth at the Excelsior diner or a tiny rental car that Jessica forces him to get when she needs the family car one day.

This is the kind of book where Ruby Tuesday and Gorilla-Man (not to be confused with Gorilla Man) are as likely to show up as Tombstone or Jessica Jones, where you can find a character referring to Strange as a "pendejo" or hear the words "Fistball Special" and jokes about how hard it is to brand something with the word "fist." I loved it.

It's the kind of comic that, had it been published 15-years ago, would have been relegated to a "street-level" comic, but here it's really more "neighborhood level," and while there is crime and violence in it, it's all cartoonish enough that it lacks the sort of grit and grime that it would have had back in the days of the Marvel Knights imprint. Rather, this books is spiritually closer to something like Ms. Marvel, All-New Wolverine or Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew actually  gets an amusing cameo, rooting for Luke's shirt to get ripped off during a fight), with one foot in the "funny" side of Marvel's funny book line (Howard The Duck, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, etc) and one foot in the serious side of the line (Daredevil, the X-Men and Avengers books, etc).

That story about the Supersoul Stone fills up four-fifths of this collection, while Flaviano replaces Greene for the fifth issue, a done-in-one story. Centered around radio personality Jimbo's show, "The Yo, Jimbo Show," it's essentially a sort of Rashomon deal in which various callers and witnesses discuss the apparently reunited Power Man and Iron Fist team's battle against Manslaughter Marsdale. It culminates with Luke and Danny joining Jimbo inside the studio to set the record straight, and Marsdale coming there for revenge.

Flaviano's style is distinct from that of Greene's, but it has a similar flavor, and he sticks with the Cage-as-a-giant visual motif that leads to so many great visual gags, as in a panel here where one witness claims that Cage has the power of flight.

Also, in this issue Danny builds "a modified version of the Fantastic Four's Fantasticar" using instructions he found on the Internet. He intends to call it The Power-Fist Mobile, but Cage refuses to let him call anything "Power-Fist," so Danny settles for The Fist Mobile (The Fistasticar seems more natural to me, given its origins, but whatever).

Finally, I did want to mention Jessica Jones' role in this story, as I've heard some grumbling on the Internet that here she seems to be reduced to the role of nagging wife, like a character on a 1960s sitcom getting mad at her husband for going bowling with the guys instead of staying around the house with her and the family (Here's a pretty thorough piece on that, with lots of looks at Greene's great art). I don't want to say this reading isn't valid, and it was probably more striking if these comics were being read serially, where one might see just one scene with Jessica arguing with Cage about not wearing one of his nice shirts out since it was just going to get destroyed anyway every month or so. Especially since this series started coming out when Netflix's Jessica Jones was presenting a version of the character much closer to that from Brian Michael Bendis and Michal Gaydos' Alias series than to her post-Alias portrayal  (which was also mostly written by Bendis, but in the context of his variou Avengers comics).

Read now, though, and all in one sitting, her apperances didn't strike me as those of a wet blanket or nagging wife so much as the supporting character she serves as in this series. While she is usually angry and trashing Luke and/or Danny, that's Jessica's character in a nutshell, right? Angry and talking shit all the time? She's presented as the person Cage would rather be with than out getting into fights with his immature bachelor friend, and many of the jokes featuring her are among the stronger ones (Like why Luke has started saying "Fiddle faddle" now, and why she can swear as much as she wants, and how Luke can tell she likes Danny).

Her role is certainly smaller than that of Luke or Danny, but then, this is Power Man and Iron Fist, not Power Man and Iron Fist and Jewel, or Jessica Jones' Husband, Power Man and Power Man's Pal, Iron Fist, you know? Her relative lack of panel-time in the first five issues of a series starring her husband and his friend seems as natural as, say, Alfred seeming like all he does is serve Batman food and sass him. Jessica is here, like Alfred in Batman comics, a supporting character.

Perhaps the release of her own series, now entitled Jessica Jones for closer association with the TV show, will salve the irritation some fans of hers have felt at her small role here. I am curious to see how this book and Jessica Jones will read next to one another; I've only flipped through the first issue of Jessica Jones, but stylistically and tonally they are polar opposites and, of course, Gaydos' art is all dark and photo-referenced, so it seems to be set on an entirely different planet than Power Man and Iron Fist is.

Star Wars Vol. 3: Rebel Jail

This is the first of the collections of the Marvel's main Star Wars title that I didn't purchase for myself, more so because I had missed its release than because I was dissatisfied with volume two. I just noticed it on the shelves of the library one day, realized I missed it and supposed that meant I should maybe just start reading the trades from the library instead of buying them for my home bookshelves. Now that I have read it, I'm actually kind of glad I missed it at the comics shop. It's not very good, certainly not when compared to the previous two volumes and Vader Down.

Jason Aaron continues to write the series, and while his scripting is still relatively strong, the collection suffers a bit from two main problems. First is simply one of structure. The title comes from a four-issue arc that is the center of the trade, illustrated by pencil artist Leinil Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan (whose somewhat bland take on the characters and world of Star Wars might make for a third main problem, actually). It's sandwiched between Star Wars Annual #1, by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Angel Unzueta, and another Younger Kenobi On Tattoine solo story written by Aaron and drawn by Mike Mayhew.

"Rebel Jail" features an antagonist leading a strike force of droids to a secret jail where the Rebellion keeps its worst prisoners, an antagonist who hides his face, says he sympathizes with Leia and wants her to win the war, but that he also wants to teach her that she needs to be completely ruthless, as he's seen the true evil of the Empire. His plan is to execute all of the prisoners in their cells, and to more or less force Leia to join him in doing so, or die.

Who is this mysterious character? Well, it's completely obvious in context. The annual, which immediately precedes "Rebel Jail," introduces us to rebel spy working deep undercover as an administrator on Coruscant. When he has to break cover to try to rescue some high-level prisoners and assassinate Emperor Palpatine, he learns just how evil Palpatine is ("I'm not even the same species of monster") and takes a blast of force lightning to the face. He survives, but just barely, and with a new appreciation of how Palpatine's complete lack of morals actually gives him a strategic advantage.

So when one turns the pages and sees this helmeted, masked character telling Leia he knows her, he felt betrayed by her, she needs to toughen up and so on, it's not difficult to imagine who it is. Aaron nevertheless presents it as some sort of suspenseful mystery to be drawn out.

The other problem? The early issues of the series were in part so successful because they focused on the core group of heroes from the first three films working together, as opposed to focusing on new, minor characters like so much of the expanded universe material has. Here the band is pretty thoroughly broken up.

Leia gets the majority of the focus, and here she is teamed with new character Sana and other new character Dr. Aphra, Darth Vader's new ally from the pages of Darth Vader (which I also gave up on buying, but that because I didn't like the art and found it unpleasant to read). When the prison gets attacked, Leia and Sana forge an uneasy alliance with Aphra (who turns out to have been Sana's former lover? Ha ha, take that Star Wars bros! This arc stars all ladies, two of of them "of color" and also lesbians!).

Luke and Han are off on their own side mission. Charged with buying supplies, Han loses all of the money gambling and so they are forced to try smuggling to earn back the money. Their scenes are all played strictly as comedy, making for a sharp and grating contrast to the more deadly serious business in the prison which, remember, is all about morality, war, crime and punishment and suchlike. Their plot line eventually intersects with that of Leia and the ladies, but not until the final issue, during which they are mostly unconscious.

The droids get even less panel-time; Aaron writes a funny bit in which C3-PO thinks he engages in fisticuffs, but its not particularly well-drawn. And as for Chewbacca, he's completely MIA; I am assuming this story is set during the events of his own (pretty damn good) miniseries, which I covered here.

So that thing that made the first volume so exciting? The heroes of the original Star Wars trilogy vs. the villain of the original Star Wars trilogy, a sort of high-quality, paper expansion from Episode IV in the manner of the original Marvel Star Wars comics, only with the level of care and respect that the material rates in 2016 vs. 1977? That's no longer here. The quality is, mostly (Yu's not as strong as John Cassady or Stuart Immonen, at least not with this material), and so this reads an awful lot like the sort of Star Wars comics that Dark Horse was producing right before they lost the license, specifically the later issues of the Brian Wood-written one.

As for the Kenobi story, it is as lovely looking as previous Mayhew/Star Wars comics...and about as dull, as really, there's only so much Aaron seems able to do with the "Kenobi just kinda hangs around on Tatooine for like 20 years" set-up, particularly in these only occasional, 20-ish page installments. It does look like he's setting something up for the next installment though, that will tie-in to the future/present a bit, but I was a little surprised by how uninteresting these Kenobi stories are, especially considering how awesome John Jackson Miller's prose novel Star Wars: Kenobi, which is set in this same basic time period, is. I wonder if Marvel should maybe just hire Miller for the Kenobi issues...?

Finally, it just now occurred to me as I was putting the cover into this post how bad a cover it is for this particular volume. As I said, Leia stars in the title story arc, which accounts for a good 80 or so of the 130 story pages in this collection, and yet it's those two goofballs from the comedy relief interludes that are on the cover. Probably on account of the fact that they are dudes.

Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol. 3–The Sho-Torun War

The third-ish collection of Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader series (depending on how you want to place Vader Down in the timeline) consists of Star Wars: Darth Vader: Annual #1 and issues #16-#19 of the Darth Vader ongoing. Structurally then, it is akin to the Star Wars collection just discussed, leading off with an annual (drawn by Leinil Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan) that serves as the first chapter of a story arc in the monthly series, still being drawn by Salvador Larroca (not a fan, although, as stated in previous volumes, he does well enough here, given how many characters have frozen metal faces, and how much of each page is technologically-driven set-dressing).

Vader is on a "diplomatic" mission to the titular planet, an important mining planet with an elaborate court culture that is toying with rebelling against the Empire. That makes it the sort of diplomatic mission that is perfectly-suited to an emotionless invincible robot space wizard like Vader. He basically kills a whole bunch of people (with some help from his droids; Triple-Zero's completely un-subtle attempts to encourage the court to drink the poison he's slipped into their drinks is particularly charming), and installs his own preferred puppet, giving her a damn cold reminder of what happens when planets piss off The Empire. And I mean that literally; he presents her with a gift that she could probably use as a paper weight or a conversation piece, but also performs the function of letting her and anyone who sees it know The Empire is totally cool with killing on a planetary scale.

Yu does a pretty great job on the art in this issue, and is particularly effective of portraying Vader as the kind of cool, never riled customer who just walks calmly through all kinds of terrible dangers, occasionally parrying a blaster bolt with his light saber or casually waving his arm to call upon The Force to fuck some shit up for him.

"The Shu-Torun War" begins in earnest after that, as Vader must return to the planet with a bunch of Stormtroopers and AT-ATs to aid his puppet leader in putting down a rebellion by the many mining barons who aren't down with this new world order. It's a pretty good Darth Vader story, playing him off of various other characters from The Emperor, to some of his surviving rivals that Palpatine set up for him in the first volume (his presentation of one of them to The Emperor is pretty cool), to a sassier-than-usual Triple-Zero, to his ally on Shu-Torun.

Gillen and Larocca also devise a pretty great set-piece in the war, involving giant, tower-sized drill-ships that fly through solid ground like rocket-ships. It's the sort of inventive scene that punctuated the first six films, but was missing from the seventh.